


breathing just a little, calling it a life

by Lvslie



Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti)
Genre: Dreams vs. Reality, Eddie Kaspbrak Lives, Getting Together, Hurt/Comfort, Inspired by Orpheus and Eurydice (Ancient Greek Religion & Lore), M/M, Peter Pan - Freeform, Question: how lynchian can I make the clown movie?, Repressed Cinematic Universe, or does he?, update: fixed and rewritten in parts and generally touched up now, water imagery & symbolism, we bend logic here and we dwell in dreams, yearning. Pining.
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-09
Updated: 2019-11-09
Packaged: 2021-01-20 20:34:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 12,111
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21287768
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lvslie/pseuds/Lvslie
Summary: He has dreams about Eddie floating in water.[Or: Richie goes back, inevitably.]
Relationships: Eddie Kaspbrak/Richie Tozier
Comments: 67
Kudos: 373





	breathing just a little, calling it a life

**Author's Note:**

> i just, i had to get this out of my system
> 
> update 09/11: i am reupdating this!!! finally proofread it properly hshshhsh the amount of misspellings and looping sentences gave me such whiplash. so here it is, but. better and with some rewrites

**** _**I.** [Have you ever tried to enter the long black branches of other lives_—_]_  


He has dreams about Eddie floating in water.

He tells Bill, drunkenly, words slurring and muttered into the phone he presses to his face, crouched on the floor by the bed. There’s a dull pulsing ache in his head, probably from lack of sleep, or maybe dehydration. His vision is blurry.

Bill’s quiet for an indeterminate time, then says, _“I d-don’t know, Rich.”_

“But it—means something,” Richie protests, voice small. Pleading? Yeah, maaybe. He’s too pissed to care. The whole room is floating, unstable around him, colors muddled with a dirty green-grey. _Greywater_. Eddie’s small body in the quarry, held as if effortlessly by surface tension, eyes closed. His skin looks grey as well, grey in the dead light. 

_“W-water m-might,”_ Bill hesitates, his voice tinny and distant across the bad connection. He sounds half made-up, like maybe Richie is only projecting the expected answer into his own stagnant silence. Maybe he is. _“_

_M-might r-represent d-different things. B-being overwhelmed. Escape. L-loss. P-perhaps a certain… d-death drive.”_

“He’s already dead,” Richie points out, helplessly. 

He drags himself closer to the bed, knees bent to the chest, and draws the sheet around himself. His vision is blurring. Eddie’s eyes are closed, and his face void of expression. Richie wades trough the water towards him, feeling neither resistance nor cold, but only the light pull of the current, guiding him. There ought not be currents in a lake, but something tells him _maybe the lake wants to become a river._ He reaches in the only viable direction, for Eddie’s hand, the fingers splayed out. It’s not quite _cold_ in touch, either.

_“I k-know, R-richie.”_

_That_ means something, but he doesn’t want to think about it. No, it’s not that: he doesn’t know how. He hangs up, pressing his eyes closed, and lets the phone drop to the floor. He feels like he’s maybe shivering, whole-body tremors and those odd spasmodic breaths he used to only ever see in Eddie. Trying to ground himself, he wraps an arm around his knees and pushes his forehead down, as if to _stop seeing_. 

But the more desperately he closes his eyes, the clearer he sees Eddie’s face, blurry and pale in a static halo of phosphenes.

_“Eddie,”_ Richie always says in the dream, shaking Eddie’s shoulder. _“Don’t fall asleep in the water.”_

Then Eddie opens his eyes, large, brown, _living_ eyes; he inhales noisily through his nose, and he reaches up clumsily to steady himself on Richie’s shoulder. He blinks a couple of times, frowns, as if to remember something. He seems only half-awake, something skeptical in the way he looks at Richie making it seem like he doesn’t quite _believe_ in him being there.

_“I had a dream,”_ Eddie says. His voice is always too old, somehow, too hoarse. Rendered wrong, maybe, by Richie’s splintered nonlinear memory. Here, as he is, he seems too young to contain it. 

Nervously, Richie pulls at Eddie’s elbow, trying to steer them against the current, towards the shore, but Eddie holds him back. He keeps frowning, and his hands grow somehow colder. 

_“Yeah?”_ Richie says, trying not to sound panicked, trying not to feel like Eddie’s laughable weight is dragging them down, pulling persistently downwards. _“Wet dream, huh, Eds?”_

There’s a moment—and, somehow, it’s the most terrifying of the _entire thing_, this _one moment_ of absolute silence coagulating in perfect stillness between and around them. Eddie’s eyes are dull, hollow on Richie’s face, and they look both at him and _past_ him.

_“I think I drowned,”_ he says, and there is no other noise to distract from it. _“I think I’m still drowning.”_

He’s heavy, then, heavy and cold, and Richie tries to hold on, but Eddie is falling down from him, under the water, his strange alien eyes wide open even as he submerges. 

_“I’m sorry,”_ Richie whispers, _“I’m sorry, Eds, I’m sorry. Eddie, I’m sorry. I’m—”_

Eddie just looks, and sinks.

Shaking, Richie cowers on the floor. Somewhere near and unreachable, his phone is buzzing furiously. 

* * *

_**II.** [ Well, there is time left —_   
_fields everywhere invite you into them.]_

Some dreams are different, and he considers them in detail as he sits on the edge of the grimy bathtub in the ill-lit bathroom, a half-filled bottle tucked between his knees.  His glasses are broken and his eyes are tired, perpetually blurry from residual dreams. Nightmares? No, aren’t you—aren’t you supposed to want _rid_ of nightmares? Richie revels in them, is sick of them, yes, and feels like he’s gotten good at them. Sickeningly good.

When he looks in the mirror, the mirror is cracked, even though logic says it’s just the _way_ he’s looking that’s wrong. 

He’s told them he’s going away to Alaska to find himself. White lie. He got sober for it, too, specifically. Cleaned up with conscious effort and dragged himself down to breakfast included apparently in his indeterminate hotel bill. Sometime after Bill’s—or _Bev’s_ eightieth phone call or one of Mike’s threats that they’ll come burgle in to check on him, it dawns dimly to Richie that he really—really doesn’t fucking _want_ them to check on him. See him. There’s nothing to see. Quite literally.

Nothing left.

“Am I fine? I’m fucking _peachy_,” he says, grinning, over the glass of orange juice the ripe smell of which makes him want to throw up.  He keeps his shaking hands carefully out of shot. It’s cunning, it is, worryingly well-practiced. He doesn’t give a shit. “I’ve been fucking—meditating. Thinking of taking up yoga. Jesus, I’ve literally never written so much in my life. I just need some time, you know. To pull myself together. I mean, fuck, c’mon. Forty years old closet case recovers from amnesia and gets in touch with his inner self. That warrants some thought, man.”

They buy it. _Do_ they buy it? He thinks they _want_ to, at the very least, and he doesn’t blame them. He wishes he could, too. 

Richie doesn’t want to blame it entirely on Eddie, either, this—_midlife crisis,_ as Ben would call it in his sympathetic voice. He wants to think he’d go through it in some shape anyway, the sheer—_volume_ of repression and misguided fumbling he now has to account for, would, _fuck_, weigh down someone ten times more cohesive than Richie. And it doesn’t take much to be that, Richie thinks. He lives, or remains, scattered.

He’d like to imagine Bill in his place, Big Saint fucking _Bill_ coping better, only—well, no, he doesn’t. He doesn’t want to imagine _anyone_ in his place, not _ever_.  And this is all nothing but tiptoeing around the central point, anyway. Which goes something like this: with Eddie not dead, he’d _go through it_. He’d maybe feel like there’s a point in _going_.

He wants, at his lowest hours, to console himself with the idea it was their joint, difficult decision; that there was some collective moral allowance to leave Eddie behind in Neibolt, dead or yet-dying like some fucking war hero, and then ascend together into the better half of their misery. They sure tried, to _console_ him with it, in their own specific ways. It doesn’t work, can’t work. His guilt is private, deep-cutting.

This time, innerly, Richie sides with the silent. Whenever he thinks of Eddie, he peripherally thinks also of Stan, who carries the implication of agency. Volition. And then he _knows_ there can be nothing collective about a decision that won’t ever be acceptable to him, personally, particularly. Simply because, he’d never—_consciously_, never leave Eddie behind unless asked, repeatedly, to leave him. He _has_ never. Call it masochism, Richie called it bad luck. Squatted on the kissing bridge carving stupid letters to distract himself from being terrified of his own irrational persistence in bad luck, his—fondness for it. 

He thinks of _that_, again, looking into the mirror through cracked glass. _Through the glass, darkly_. Or something. Then he’s thinking of words again, _death drive_, and well, maybe. Maybe you could call it that, too.

_“I think I’m still drowning.”_

It follows: if Richie has ever known Eddie, if Eddie was the only person he has ever _known_, he must know this as well, Eddie wouldn't like it there. Eddie would want to leave.

His other dreams are quieter, carefully void of an excess of words. They’re in a hammock, kind of illogically tangled together, and Eddie is doing something he would do, nudging his socked foot into Richie’s ribs with some sick satisfaction painted on his smarmy little face. Richie pretends to ignore him, entirely focused on acknowledging the need to ignore him. If he waits long enough, Eddie’ll lose his attention span, and Richie will twist his legs and kick him off, only to hear, “_What the fuck, fuck you! Asshole!”_

Only, here it’s not quite right: or it is _too right_ to accept. Eddie isn’t moving. Eddie never _not moves_. But Richie is very focused—very focused on ignoring it, that Eddie isn’t moving, that it’s so quiet that he should be able to hear Eddie breathe but doesn’t, that his feet seem cold in the wet socks, that his socks are wet. He’s reading a comic, yes, even though when he looks at the pictures, they’re nothing but colors, fading. Into grey.

He stares at his splintered, aged, asynchronous reflection and takes a swig from the bottle. The light flickers.

And truth be told, there’s only one dream he can’t _stand_, and by can’t stand he means, he wakes up sobbing, sweat-drenched, shaking so hard he can’t even attempt to get up until he wears himself out completely, and then he only lies there, breathing, feeling like he shouldn’t still have a body.

It’s very simple: they’re lying in the grass at the edge of the quarry, half-asleep in lulling sunlight. And then Eddie’s hand finds his own: warmed by the sun, his fingers smaller than his. He looks over.

Eddie is blue in the face, mouthing something noiselessly. Richie tries to move, but somehow can’t, somehow is unable to do it. He watches Eddie suffocate, eyes open the whole time, holding his weakening hand until it’s cold. 

The old light panel finally gives in, going down with a dry crash, sinking the skewed reflection of a man growing old, in the greyest shade of blue. 

* * *

**III.** [_And who will care, who will chide you if you wander away_  
_from wherever you are, to look for your soul?_]

It’s not a plan so much as it is a logical extension of a sleep-deprived, borderline drunk fantasy, and a fantasy with great gaping holes in too. Interestingly, Richie finds no arguments against as he talks himself into it, aloud, pacing his haphazard hotel room and aimlessly rearranging its contents.

_ It follows. _

He shoots a few authentic-feeling messages to the Losers, which—maybe logically should be _difficult_, given his now-permanent state of fragmented focus mixed with tremblingly feverish mania. 

But then, when _hasn’t_ he communicated like someone who doesn’t quite perceive the need to be coherent. He makes up many details—inane, weirdly specific, of the writing cabin, the bad signal so he can’t send photos and it’s _a fucking shame guys cuz the guy who owns it looks like a tall danny devito lmao_

He sends off the last thumbs up to Ben’s _good luck in alaska bro while, _then shoves his phone into the freezer. For some reason, his brain applauds the consistency: Alaska. Cold. Well, _shit_, his phone just _froze over._

“Goodnight,” Richie says cheerily, shutting the freezer door and rubbing his hands together.

He checks out of the hotel to the visible—and frankly, insulting—relief of the owner, gets into his rental car and drives to the nearest store to get a map, some sustenance and a disposable phone. 

The girl behind the counter is giving him a worried look, which—okay, _fair_, he doesn’t look his best, he shaved carelessly and taped his glasses more or less back intact, but he knows that’s less than little. He probably looks like every leaflet warning against an escaped murder convict ever printed.

It isn’t until he drives haphazardly out of the parking lot that it clocks she probably recognized his face from YouTube, or television, or the countless articles, _Comedian Richie Tozier Disappears After Major Public Breakdown. _He frowns a little, at the realization. 

The only way in which it bothers him is, he doesn’t want the Losers to find out he’s not currently practicing the art of Zen in Alaska. Not yet, at least, while they can still do something about it. But eh, _fuck_ it. Too late to think of something better, he’ll improvise. In the meantime, he drives to the airport.

_To follow._

* * *

It’s night when he reaches Derry. It’s strangely comforting, and prevents him from hiding surreptitiously from—well, now, from _what_ exactly? Hard to say, but if Richie had to pin it down, he’d say the general feeling of _awareness_. Like the hellish town, itself, could sniff out his comeback and radiate it to the Losers by some network of metaphysical dendrites. Which it will, probably, night or no. 

Nothing dies in Derry. Least of all _Derry_.

This way, at least, he drives the rental car no.2 straight to Neibolt without second glance at things like, say, his old house. In a way, _it feels nice to feel focused._ He falls out of the car ungainly, shocked slightly by the fresh night air (he spent how many nights in the hotel? how many hours awake?), and realizes he has no weapon—would he _need_ a weapon? 

A weapon against what? He thinks it reasonable to hope the worst thing he’ll encounter is Eddie. Eddie in the state he ought to be a month after being buried alive. The thought, dim and half-coherent as it is, makes him feel suddenly violently sick. 

But there’s no point in going back, now. No _point_ to return to.  He straightens from where he’s doubled over, supporting himself on the car. If he were to do it at all, it could only be not in his right mind. And can he ever be in his right mind, now? He’s walking before he understands it, steadily, into the sunken pile of rubble. _Right mind_. There’s something like a hole, a gaping wound descending into the ground, where he thinks the entrance might have been. He sticks his temporary phone into his teeth, faint flashlight on, and lowers himself inside, hands scraping on the ground; then suddenly the earth gives way and then he’s _falling_.

_Right._

* * *

He carries Eddie’s body to the quarry.

Carries is maybe relative, it’s more that he half-drags, half-hauls him, crying all the way, having occasionally to stop on the way and sink to his knees, wheezing for breath and holding him close. For some reason, he keeps repeating, in a shattered rambling voice, “It’s okay, Eds, it’s okay. It’s okay, man, it’s _okay_.”

It isn’t okay, it is perhaps as far from fucking okay as it gets, but Richie can’t stomach that notion quite yet.

Finding him was nightmare enough.

He nearly stays, once more: down there in the rubble, clinging to Eddie until they both turn to the same dust. Eddie seems miraculously preserved, suspended in the exact shape he died: face drawn and eyes downturned, shoulders bent forward, dried blood staining his skin. There's some bittersweet value in the idea of staying, going to sleep, perhaps even being allowed to believe there was never any delay. If Richie closes his eyes, Eddie might, too, be sleeping.

But Eddie, Eddie wouldn't like it there. And when Richie finally heaves himself up from the ground, pulling Eddie with him, he goes pliant.

He doesn’t remember much more. 

It’s still night outside, air warm and strident with crickets, and a mild unobtrusive wind carding through his hair. He draws to a halt at the sharp cusp of the precipice cutting out against the backdrop of the water, which in the dark seems like a chasm, distant and amorphous, having neither end or substance.

He holds Eddie close, his breath ragged, and stares down. He’s jumped in, many times, and swam back up. The wind is ringing in his ears, and his knees are trembling. _Come float._ There’s only one logical step to take, and it’s illogical. It would not a good way to die, he doesn’t think. To drown in this stifling dirty water tasting of childhood. He’s not sure what is there left to do if he _doesn’t_. _Come float._ But it does, dimly, make sense, because—water. _I’ve had a dream that I drowned._ And this time, Richie would go as meant to, _following_. They’ll go together, hand in hand, into the last place. _Come float._

And isn’t it meant to be a river, there at the threshold? Isn’t there a figure at the other side, hooded, waiting? And a chance that—

Shaking, Richie presses his eyes closed. _So be it._

“Hold on,” he whispers, pressing his lips into Eddie’s temple, and hauls them over the edge.

* * *

The water is shocking.

It’s _cold_. It hurts, it resists, it _fights_ him instead of guiding like it had in the dream, and Richie would scream if he could, scream his lungs raw. 

But he loses track of linearity, _somehow_, and loses the concept of agency and volition. There’s the moment of absolute violence, the collision when he still feels Eddie in his arms, and then he can’t breathe, and then suddenly he’s _lightweight_. Arms let go, mouth opens, yielding. His whole _body_ yields to it, mind open and idle in acceptance.

There’s nothing to say for that state except that it’s _clean_, somehow, wiped down of all person and consciousness. It’s quiet, and _cold_, somehow both colorless and grey. Removed from Eddie, removed even from himself, Richie floats.

_We float._

And then his hands are moving, somehow without him, straining against the aimless and swallowing water, and then there’s suddenly air and he’s suddenly _fighting_ for it, and then, blessedly, there’s the _breathing_. 

The air is stinging cold, violent, and his lungs hurt with it more than it should be allowable. Pushing his arms through the ripples, Richie steadies himself, encountering somewhere on the surface his lost glasses. 

It’s a strange fucking thing to realize, after diving headfirst into the hazy idea of death, that you went in with the directly opposite intention. 

But he feels it, now, shaking with his hammering heart, he feels, _fuck_. Wide awake.

First time in months, years maybe. He’s sober, scared, exhausted_. Alive._

“Eddie,” Richie yells, hoarsely, and wades through the water.

He’s _floating_, yes, on the very surface. Like in the dream, somehow weightless even as he’s taller and older; and he goes pliant when Richie gathers him to himself with trembling arms and pulls them both to the shore. There’s no current to stop him: the water gives way. 

He crawls out onto the rocky ground and goes to his knees, cradling Eddie in his lap.

“See?” Richie chokes out, in some hysterical whisper that seems jarring to his ears, giddy, “You didn’t. You didn’t drown. You’re not fucking drowning. Just—breathe, Eddie. Fucking _breathe_, Eds, you never even had asthma.”

It must be dawning, he thinks, because the light has changed into this strange and mobile grey, crawling as if in scattered half-pigmented pixels. Eddie’s face is ashen and cold, _vague_, but so is everything else, the world in sickly monochrome, suspended out of precision. 

“_Come on_, Eds,” Richie whispers. “_Wake up_.”

There’s a searing cry—of a bird, an _eagle_, and Richie startles so much he pulls Eddie close and looks up, blinking rapidly, into the slowly paling sky. He feels exposed, laid out for judgement. No defenses. He wants to ask, by some deep-sealed childish instinct, _Stan. Are those even nocturnal birds?_

But he doesn’t, because the human mind can account for one impossibility only at a given time. Or maybe it’s just a matter of time, maybe if Richie really _focused_, he could hear Stan's answer too, his voice still clear and returning. But he’s nothing more than just himself; he falls distracted.

As he watches the bird taxi the quarry on widespread black-cut wings, there’s a different voice, quiet, as if itself disbelieving its own hoarse sound.

_“Don’t … don’t call me Eds.”_

The light is cold, dawning.

* * *

_**IV.** [Listen, are you breathing just a little, and calling it a life?]_

Strangely, the fact it doesn’t make any sense makes the most sense.

What makes the _least_ sense, Richie thinks, is the nurse’s insistence on asking him if he’s okay. Yes, he is. Clearly he must have been _okay enough_ to bodily carry Eddie from the quarry and to the rental car, and then drive to the hospital without crashing, though he doesn’t exactly remember that. But he’s done it. Would someone who is _not okay _be able to—and even if not. 

Even if it doesn’t make sense, who _cares?_

The only word he registers—after a time—is _hypothermia_. It’s an Eddie word, so it draws Richie’s fractured attention, momentarily, to the annoyed tired-looking woman uttering it. 

“Where’s Eddie?” he asks, hazily, cutting her off. 

Some of the tension drains out of her face. “He’s still in surgery,” she says, and oh, _yeah_, he _knows_ that. He thinks—_maybe_—he has asked before, and was told the same thing. It doesn’t really make sense: the word _still_ seems to Richie to be void of meaning. Eddie was _still_ dead when he found him, and now Eddie maybe _still_ isn’t. Richie is _still_ alive, even if it feels like a new thing. 

He has trouble comprehending this circular linearity, but he yields to it, and repeats the question. The question makes sense, it must.

“Sir, I really need you to come with me. You don’t want to be unconscious if—_when_ Eddie comes out of surgery. Right?”

And that clicks, yes . Maybe it’s just simple enough. And Richie feels like he’d spent enough time in his life, feeling to some extent unconscious. Dormant. There’s no need to extend that. He nods, suddenly docile.

He says, “okay.” And then things happen. He doesn’t really remember how, and in which order.

* * *

When he next registers his surroundings—or so it feels—he is lying face down on a hospital bed. Or rather, his face is, and his arms, gathered under his face and stiff from discomfort. He thinks, other than that, he might be sitting in a chair. 

He thinks he’s been sleeping, too; it feels like he’s coming awake. There’s a strange half-physical sensation, of someone’s hesitant and halting hand carding through his hair. Richie winces, blinks and raises himself up.

Eddie’s hand, slit open with the IV, falls to the bed. 

His eyes are open, too: large and wary in the wan blue light of the monitor. It must be night, as there is no other light. There’s no noise, either. No distraction. Richie holds his breath.

“Morning,” he then says, without quite meaning to, and is thrown off momentarily by how low and gravelly his voice sounds. “Took a wee nap, did you, Eddie Spaghetti?”

Eddie looks at him. There’s a strange _quality_ to his looking, which Richie recognizes, in mild terror, from his own dreams: something _halfway_. Like he’s looking at Richie, and also at the same time past him, into the place beyond. The place Richie has once seen, in passing, in a flash that someone called _deadlights_; place terrible enough to never want to remember.

He can’t allow it, not this, to be the first thing Eddie _will_ remember, so he tugs at his now-limp hand desperately, and cracks a strained, brittle grin. 

“I—I know this sounds insane,” he stammers, and his voice is shaking, but there isn’t much he can do about it, “but I’m scared shitless this is just another—cracky dream I’m having, and I need it—I need it not to _be_ a fucking dream, Eds. I need to know I didn’t just imagine you. I’m not fucking kidding. I need it, so I need you to. Acknowledge me. _Please_.” 

His voice breaks.

Eddie blinks. His hand in Richie’s grip twitches, lightly.

He opens his mouth, then tenses, as if suspended between speech and silence. Then, in a stilted wondering voice, he says, “Did I—did I really tell you I _fucked your mom?_”

Something inside Richie collapses at these words, evidently, because he lets out something between a violent gasp and a sob, and shudders. It’s not the words, it’s not even the memory, it’s just—his voice, his voice is right. He’s—

He takes Eddie’s limp hand in both of his and tugs to himself, nodding, and then _laughs_, more properly this time, though it’s still very shaky.

“Yeah,” he says. “Yeah, _fuck you_, you did. Worst last fucking words I’ve ever heard.”

“Okay,” Eddie says. His voice is still so small and hesitant, he almost sounds like he did as a kid. “And then I … then I died.”

Richie doesn’t answer, because he doesn’t think he _can_ answer. He doesn’t think it’s fair, to ask him to answer. And Eddie seems to know that anyway, because he merely nods at the lack of response, and his eyes glaze over again, just a little. 

Richie swallows, his throat tightening in panic, and looks down. He feels like he’s waiting, in abject terror, for something he doesn’t understand but that might be coming, and he might have to accept it.

At length, Eddie’s hand squeezes his, one small but decisive twitch, and when Richie he looks back up, sharply, Eddie is smiling. It’s a wan, shadowy facsimile of his old smile, but it’s maybe the best thing Richie’s ever seen, second only to Eddie’s open eyes.

“It _sucked_,” Eddie says, hoarsely. “Thanks for bringing me back.”

Richie nods. He’s crying now, quiet and spasmodic, but he doesn’t think Eddie minds. They keep like that for a while, _looking_, both too tired to do anything but. Around, it’s still so dark and quiet.

* * *

_**V.** [While the soul, after all, is only a window,]_

He kicks up a fuss with the nurse as soon as he wakes up stiffened and profoundly disoriented in the blindingly bright morning and Eddie is _there_, already awake, watching him intently with his wide exhausted eyes.

“I didn’t want to fall asleep again,” he explains, with audible effort, and sounding a little scared. “In case it’d stick this time.”

“Jesus Christ,” Richie replies, hoarsely, pushing himself up. “Fucking wait here, I’ll get the nurse.”

He thinks Eddie wants to maybe say something back, about _not being able to move anyway_—he kinda _looks_ like he does—but does not. There’s too little certainty of _himself_ in him just yet, maybe, to warrant following his own patterns. 

_Which is fine_, Richie reasons with himself, skidding down the hallway to the nurse’s office, yelling something shrilly, incoherently, about needing attention, _there will be time. _

* * *

The second major thing that doesn’t make sense is the amount of prying _attention_ the doctors give Eddie’s condition. Not in the sense that they want to _heal_ him, Richie would be absolutely on board with that. In fact, he pesters them about it relentlessly. No, in the sense that they seem to think it’s,

“_Bizarre_,” doctor—Whateverishisname—proclaims, for the millionth time. “I’ve never seen anything like it in my life. Are you sure you don’t _remember_ what happened?”

“Yes,” Richie lies. It’s a small lie. An infinitesimal big fucking lie. He doesn’t remember _many things._ He kind of wishes he didn’t remember this one. “Tabula rasa. Untrodden snow. I basically awakened at the hospital.”

Strange thing is, _this_ is not a lie, at least in his private perspective. The hospital staff are strangely reluctant to accept it. Which, 

“_No shit_,” Eddie says, frowning, with his dainty little cup of shredded ice in hand, as Richie regales the story. “It doesn’t fucking make _sense_, Richie.”

The more aware and steadier Eddie gets, the pissier he seems to become. It’s like honey, it’s like _chicken soup_ for Richie’s heart.

Eddie sleeps a lot and doesn’t talk much. It’s jarring, uncharacteristic, and it keeps Richie in a constant state of tense expectation for some other cue to manifest, cue to wake up or see clearly what he refuses to look at. He can’t but accept it might still come.

There’s nothing urgently physically _wrong_ with Eddie, if you count out the excessive scarring on his chest and cheek, signifying two places in which he was, as Richie does remember, speared by an object. There is, however, no resulting damage to Eddie’s internal organs, and the wounds are _fresh but healed_.

“Which doesn’t make sense.”

“_You_ don’t make sense,” Richie snaps at the doctor, nastily, which somehow shuts him up. “You’re telling me he miraculously healed on his own and you can’t even say how or why?”

Yes, that’s precisely what they are saying. 

There _were_ some things urgently wrong with Eddie: _severe_ dehydration, _severe_ concussion, _severe_ exhaustion, _mild_ hypothermia and—perhaps most significantly—_severe_ mental trauma. They’re, save for the last one, more or less taken care of now.

Richie’s dared ask only _once_, and Eddie has tensed, and fallen quiet. 

Then he’s said, in a halting clipped voice, “I saw—” and trailed off. And then he’s said, “No one should see that.”

They leave it at that. 

* * *

Days kind of blur together, one spilling messily into another, filled with Richie pretending to live at the nasty room in the motel near the hospital, falling asleep from sheer exhaustion only to wake up choking, convinced Eddie is yet dead and he has yet to go and retrieve him; and then crawling in the lowlight to wither in the austere chair at Eddie’s bedside until late morning, rewatching YouTube compilations of conspiracy theories regarding _Richie Tozier’s disappearance _on his shitty phone, until Eddie wakes up.

“Don’t you ever sleep?” Eddie asks once, frowning, and Richie shrugs. “We who feast on human blood don’t feel those measly needs.” This annoys Eddie out of asking again.

He’d almost call it a comforting routine, if it weren’t for the lingering, paranoid feeling of running out of time. Of being _watched_, judged, measured, only to be delivered a sentence, sometime—sometime soon. 

He’d blame Derry—and he’d be right to, probably, to a big extent. But it’s not _just_ Derry.

He flops onto his chair, shoves the cardboard-flavored cup of hospital tea at Eddie, and sighs dramatically. Eddie blinks, waiting. It’s one of his quiet days. There’s still more of them than others. 

“I’m pretty sure,” Richie begins, tiredly, rubbing his eye under his glasses, “that if we stay here for much longer, they’re either gonna call the cops to investigate your mysterious misadventure, or like, do the whole _One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest _bit. On both of us. Saw that nurse again today, the one who looks like Diane Keaton on Ket—Diane _Keton_, ha—well, she’s practically _salivating_ over you.”

Eddie winces, Richie imagines, at this or that minor detail of the way he’s presented the situation. But the expression is soon lost in the hazy look of abject misplacement, which steals over his features so often, for hours on end at times, and which has Richie cling to his hand and talk hushed nonsense until it clears, because he can’t stand witnessing in silence.

Then Eddie says, haltingly, with so much hesitance it’s heartbreaking, “But I don’t—where would I even _go_?”

For a moment, Richie can’t reply, somehow stuck on the problem of formulating, _wherever it is, I can’t accept letting you go alone, so you’ll have to let me follow, even if it means camping out on Myra’s immaculate doormat._

_How’s that for subverting the genre, Orphedice. Eurypheus._

Instead he says, “Uh.”

And then without warning, Eddie’s face crumples, and his hands starts shaking so hard he spills most of the tea all over himself and he’s taking shallow, arrhythmic breaths, like all those times _before_, when they were so much _younger_. 

He chokes out, “Fuck, I _can’t_. I can’t go back. That was—that was a nightmare, I was dead, Myra and all, _all of it_ and—and I know it doesn’t make any fucking sense because _then I was, then I really died_, but fucking dying would be better than just forgetting all over again and going back to—going back to—”

He cuts off suddenly, as if surprised, and Richie suddenly realises it’s because he’s snatched the cup from Eddie’s tea-wet hands took them in his. It surprises him, as well, in the sense he doesn’t quite remember deciding to do it.

But it has its own logic.

“Eds,” he says, slowly, and he watches Eddie try and fight the rising panic, swallow it down, though his eyes are still huge and deerlike. “Eddie Spaghetti. No one’s making you go back anywhere. None of us_ went back_. I—we remembered, all of us. When we got out. And I—I won’t just leave you like this, unless you tell me to fuck off, I’ll stick around, and, and we’ll think of something. Fuck Myra. I mean, she thinks you’re dead anyway. So fuck her.”

Slowly, Eddie nods, winding down. Some of the acute sharp fear fades from his wide eyes, dulling. After a moment, Richie feels Eddie’s hands squeeze back, faintly, and he smiles.

And then suddenly he’s nervous, and when he’s nervous he _talks_, so then suddenly he’s _talking_, and letting go of Eddie’s wet hands to stuff his own in the pockets of his ratty jacket.

“I have—I mean, uh, this sounds so _shitty_ but. I have—I got—an apartment in, uh, in fucking _Monterey_, which. Ha. And like, I don’t live there. I don’t. I just _go_ there sometimes to kind of, I don’t know, fucking. Be somewhere else. And like—I don’t think anyone knows, or, or cares. Cause it’s fucking—Monterey. Which, well, that—it’s convenient, man, when you just want to kinda disappear. So we could—if you wanted, to do. That. We could, like, go. There. And stay for a little.”

By the time he’s finished, Eddie’s eyebrows have knitted together into a frown, his lips forming a thin line. Richie fidgets, bouncing his knee up and down and wincing out of the window. 

“I mean, it’s cool if you don’t,” he says, trying futilely to make it sound something else than pathetic.

Eddie’s response is surprising, which should be _unsurprising_. 

“You have an apartment in Monterey,” he says sourly, “that you got because you needed a place to _be somewhere else._ And you don’t live there.”

Richie squints at him. One of the lenses of his glasses is still broken, so any sideways look is basically a fun game of optical illusion. Even then, Eddie looks kind of like a sentient thundercloud. 

“Er. Yes?” he hazards.

“Okay,” Eddie says, still oddly sullen. There’s something unsettling about it, something to do with how Richie isn’t sure what Eddie thinks he’s affirming here, but he’s suddenly too much of a coward to ask for an elaboration. And then Eddie says, “I just, I kind of fucking forgot you’re rich.”

Richie blinks. And then, without any power to stop it, “Aw, man happens to the best of us. Happened to _me_. For a while there I just went as Tozier until it came back. Old age hurts.”

There’s a moment of icy silence, and then Eddie rolls his eyes so hard it looks like it hurts. “No, I changed my mind,” he grits out, “I don’t want to fucking live with you. And fuck, can you—fucking help me with this, there’s tea all over me, it’s disgusting—”

Richie grins so hard it does hurt.

* * *

**VI.** [_and the opening of the window no more difficult  
than the wakening from a little sleep._]

Eddie sleeps through most of the drive to the airport, which is in a strange way absolutely nerve-wrecking.

Mostly because Richie’s head keeps replaying Eddie’s words about not wanting to sleep for the fear of not waking up, on a sort of constant loop in his head. Because he fears seeing the loss in Eddie’s waking eyes, and he fears _it_ will stick: that he’ll descend back into the quiet grey and fall apart, or simply vanish. 

It makes him want _not_ to focus on them, so instead he focuses on the road, and drives the most neatly he has in—well. _Ever_.

And when Richie stops the car, Eddie does wake up. 

He seems even more fuzzy and subdued than usually, among the harsh noises and light, and crowds of people swarming around him. Even less solid.

There’s a whole debacle Richie silently partakes in, regarding the moral value of taking Eddie by the hand and steering him gently through the security and boarding, at risk of being later kicked or yelled at and never getting to touch Eddie at any capacity again. Which _may_ happen, as soon as Eddie comes to from his little hazy trance. 

Then, Eddie kind of plucks feebly at Richie’s wrist while looking blindly around with his most deerlike expression, and the moral dilemma is resolved. 

And Eddie sleeps through most of the flight, which is less nerve-wrecking, because his head tips sideways and onto Richie’s shoulder. _A physical touch_. He drifts off shortly after take-off, spent in contrastingly high-wired tension. It’s uncomfortable, and the right side of Richie’s neck and shoulders pulses with a near-constant dull pain by now, but he can _hear_ Eddie’s breathing this way.

That alone is calming enough to allow _him_ to drift off too, into some shallow state of half-vigilance, in which he’s both on the plane and in the water, both in Derry and not, a child and not-child. 

Eddie is there, breathing. 

* * *

“You have a hammock,” Eddie says wonderingly.

He does. It’s strange when you think about it in context of the apartment itself: seemingly spacious mostly because it is _empty_, stark naked, save for the bed, a few pieces of bland furniture and emptied alcohol bottles stuffed in the corner by the bed. It has large windows without curtains or blinds, and the walls are painted a pale greyish blue. 

In a place with such little apparent emotional attribution, that something as bizarrely specific as a hammock does on the surface appear unnerving.

Less so, perhaps, when you place the apartment in the context of Richie. It’s a space in which he’s done little more than sleep, waking in intervals only to look hazily out of the windows at the water, and drink. He remembers it in gauzy thoughtless spaces between his old—weird, inexplicable—nightmares that didn’t have a viable explanation until now, and which even now are too overwhelming to try and parse.

It should be embarrassing to acknowledge he’s had such periods of crisis, milder maybe, but similarly dissociative, before the whole thing with Eddie. That he’s had them entirely _without_ Eddie, because he lived a life, whole life, without that grounding exact shape to attribute his loss to. Just a hollow, imprinted somewhere deep. A memory of presence without a face. A scared abandoned feeling. 

“I have a hammock,” Richie repeats dully, looking out onto the balcony. The hammock is dusty but more or less intact. He remembers sleeping in it, consecutive nights of needing assurance of own identity and having no source for it. “I don’t know man, I think it like, calmed me down. Some Pavlovian fucking response, childhood thing even though I didn’t remember the childhood. Does that even make sense.”

“Yeah,” Eddie says quietly, and he seems like he wants to add something, but then doesn’t. Again the _withdrawal_: Richie tries to breathe through it without tensing. The loss comes and goes, tidal. It’s allowed, it’s allowed, it must be warranted. 

Instead he looks around the bedroom which opens into the living room.

“There’s one bed,” Richie supplies sharply, before Eddie thinks to ask. 

For some reason he’s kept his hands tucked into his pockets since walking into the flat, and it now strikes him, he must’ve somehow divined they would be shaking. “I can get you, like, a mattress or something. Or, I mean, get one for myself. Like, shit, you’re recovering from being impaled, I’m not that much of a dick. I’ll give you the good bed. Well, good’s relative. It’s like, decent. It’s bearable. It—like, okay, maybe—”

“Richie, shut up,” Eddie cuts in, audibly irritated. He sounds more, somehow, more like himself. “It’s a large fucking bed, we can share it for now. I won’t let you sleep on the floor and throw in your back somehow.”

“Aw,” Richie says, but his insides have coiled into the strangest sensation of frightened relief. He tries not to think too much about it. “You _do_ care. Cute.”

* * *

It’s unspeakably strange, to wake up and _then_ see Eddie.

He doesn’t really count the hospital, because most of it was nothing but him waiting daily to be disillusioned by reality, sleep-deprived enough to—on worse days—go as far as silently question Eddie’s physicality, too scared to reach out and make sure. On the rare occasions when he’d _slept_, the sleep was fitful enough to allow for an odd state of alertness anyway, meaning he never quite lost track of Eddie at all.

But this is different. He wakes from sleep deep enough that for a moment he has trouble understanding his own surroundings. There’s a rhythmical sound of the ocean filtering through the window, and the light is different: bright blue, acute, characteristic of early morning. He remembers no dreams. He’s not drenched in sweat or painfully stiffened, he’s—_hazy_. 

He opens his eyes, and there’s a face laid across from him, half-tucked into a pillow. It’s familiar, and it isn’t, like an ill-remembered memory—and similarly _unreal_. 

Something other than the white sheets, for the light to fall onto: and it happens to take shape of Eddie. Tired, thinner than he was, oddly boyish, even with the dark circles under his eyes, the wrinkles in his face and the sharp crease of a scar cutting into one of his cheeks.

Riche doesn’t move.

There’s something constricting his throat, and a vague realization creeping into his mind he hasn’t quite allowed there before. 

The whole period after the quarry seems, to him, tinged in a strange purple haze, scattered and illogical, at times puzzligly non-linear. If he focuses too hard, trying too ardently to understand the exact path he followed to arrive here, he can’t but fall into a panic.

He _has_ no clear way or timeline, and the one he does seems too frail and ravaged for sober cold logic.

The thought tries to push through now, but he swallows it down. Truth is: he doesn’t think he can survive being shaken awake just yet. Even if it is a dream, even if he’s still floating in the icy water of the quarry, about to die or keep on pretending to live, he won’t allow it to end yet. Maybe ever.

So instead he inhales and drags himself out of bed, dressing quickly, and taking deliberate effort to redirect his thoughts somewhere. If he calculates well, he still has some time before Eddie wakes.

* * *

Eddie doesn’t eat much. 

It bothers Richie, acutely, in some stupid mother-hen way, because Eddie also looks just about ready to snap in half, he’s so pale and _brittle_. Logically, he acknowledges the need for recovery. Illogically—

“Stop staring at me, dickwad,” Eddie snaps, shoving his fork back into the bowl of kale salad**.**

He’s dressed in Richie’s clothes, which are too large on him, and which he picked out himself. Bizarrely, the picks included a pair of running shorts Richie doesn’t remember ever wearing. This means that if Richie slouched slightly forward, he could bump his knee into Eddie’s bare one. It’s a confusingly delightful thought that carries more implications he’d care for it to carry. But it does.

“Sorry,” Richie says automatically, which—well, it says something, if he can’t even form a weak fucking _joke_ about it. “You just, uh. You should eat more, Eds.”

“Don’t call me Eds,” Eddie snaps. “And don’t you fucking turn into my mother.”  


“Well, what can I say, she _rubbed off_ on—”

“Oh, shut the fuck up.” Richie is grinning now, because, bizarre as it is, these bits of non-conversation, rare as they are, produce in him the warm tingly feeling of returning someplace and finding it pleasantly fundamentally unchanged.

And they can’t talk about the important things anyway, either of them, not without shattering.

Eddie picks up his fork, then slams it back down. “And anyway,” he says, hotly, “what the fuck is this supposed to be? It’s disgusting,” he gestures to the bowl in front of him.

“It’s a superfood,” Richie announces, menacingly. “Which you now _need_. Because you’re emaciated. So eat it.”

“Since when do you even fucking know what a superfood is?”

“Since I live in LA, dick. Now chop-chop, Spaghetti.”

Strangely, Eddie’s expression turns suddenly wistful—he seems to glitch, briefly, failing to snap back and instead staring off into space. Richie wants to believe it’s because he finally realizes the unmeasured seas of affection that lie beneath the nickname, but it seems a little far-fetched.

“What?” he says warily.

Eddie turns his wide pleading eyes to Richie’s face.

“Spaghetti,” he says, yearningly.

* * *

At the little restaurant which Richie googled frantically on the way, a bunch of women are eyeing them apprehensively. Which, _fair_, they’re not exactly the model demographic, and they both look vaguely half-dead, but also, _fuck them_. Richie scowls at them until they turn away.

Eddie wolfs down his spaghetti at a truly alarming pace and Richie would make it into a joke but he’s privately so ridiculously glad to witness something so human and predictable, that he doesn’t want to make Eddie feel embarrassed.

They spend the meal mostly in silence, and after they’re finished, Eddie sits still, eyes fixed on the surface of the table.

“This, it all. It feels—weird,” he says, stiffly. There’s tension in his face, the line of his shoulders, the fisted hands, like he doesn’t quite know what to do with himself, how to slot back into the rhythm of being a person. Richie can relate. 

At a loss to what to offer that would somehow switch the atmosphere back to tolerable, he glances out of the tall window. And there it is, shifting and tilting constantly—_water_. A massive body of water. Richie blinks, then draws in a breath.

“I think,” he says slowly, “maybe you’ve spent a little too much time lately being stuck in places. You need some air.”

Surprisingly, Eddie doesn’t fight him on it. Following Richie’s gaze to the window, he says, “Yeah.”

* * *

_**VII.** [I went out among the thorns and said_   
_to the wild roses:_   
_deny me not,_   
_ but suffer my devotion.]_

They go to the beach. By this point, Richie feels like he’s developed some strange quasi-theological relationship with the water, which is _concerning_, maybe. Or maybe it makes sense.

Eddie makes him roll up his jeans stupidly all the way up to the knees, but they get wet anyway. Maybe it’s because instead of avoiding the waves, Richie lets them crash against his calves, sharply, a faint echo of his recent nosedive. If he shivers, there’s plenty of full, briny wind to blame for it. 

Eddie’s running shorts grant him an opportunity to wade in further, should he so desire. Instead, he keeps to the shore, cautiously avoiding the crawling line of water. He keeps his hands shoved into his hoodie’s single pocket, too, and doesn’t take off his shoes. 

They wander on for a while, aimlessly. Surprisingly, Richie _does_ feel better. The dim headache that’s been a sort of a given constant for the past weeks seems to ease up a little, and he breathes better. It’s not quite relaxing: he doesn’t really think he remembers how to feel relaxed. But it’s—_nice_. 

Even the silence between them is different, companionable. Eddie has picked up a stick somewhere which she shoves into the sand occasionally, as if scanning the surroundings for dangerous objects. It’s a very Eddie thing to do, one of many Eddie things coming back to the surface in tidal waves. Richie smiles.

And then Eddie draws to a halt, poking his stick into a cluster of seaweed. He looks pensive, a frown stuck to his face. 

“Did you,” he begins hesitantly. “When we went back to Derry, before ... Did you feel, like—like you suddenly don’t really know what you’re doing? Like you’re suddenly … stranded in this weird realisation that nothing about you makes … sense?”

It’s so loud around them, the wind and the waves, so chaotic.

“Yeah,” Richie says at last, trying not to read too much into the words _makes sense_. “Kind of.”

Eddie’s jaw is set. He grits out, “I think, in a way, it hit me. Back then. I used to think I grew up and became something. But I didn’t, did I? None of us have. We stayed right where we were.”

Suddenly, he lowers himself to the sand and sits down, knees bent, looking ahead into the water. He holds on to the stick.

“I have this … life back, now,” he says, and his voice seems faraway in the wind, as if hollowed out. “And I’m grateful. I’m—I can’t even put it in words how _much_. But I don’t …” he trails off.

Richie waits, frightenedm watching. His ribcage feels too weak to hold down all underneath it.

“I don’t know what to do with it,” Eddie says at last, quietly, and looks down as though he’s ashamed. “I don’t know how to … not let it go to waste.”

Richie swallows. He thinks, to _him_, Eddie being alive negates the very concept of waste. He can’t quite say that out loud.

“Yeah, I get that,” he says instead, softly. “I don’t … even really feel like I’m old enough for any of this.”

Eddie doesn’t look up. His voice is muffled. “Me neither.”

“Kinda pathetic,” Richie offers, dipping his foot back into the water. It’s cold and quite awful in touch, but it’s also different from the quarry in a way he finds comforting. “Peter and Wendy, only they’re actually forty and gross.”

Eddie sighs, and pinches the bridge of his nose. “That would imply one of us actually _did_ grow up,” he says half-heartedly.

Richie nods, kicking a wave. “Okay. Tinker Bell.”

“Fuck you.”

“I never said _you’re_ Tinker Bell.”

They fall back into the silence, the warm and companionable of silences, Richie smiling to himself, Eddie poking his stick into the wet sand.

And then it breaks.

“Why did you come back for me?”

Richie swallows, tensing. He’s known, on some level, that this was coming. That if he dares accept Eddie’s return as any sort of—frailest even—reality, he needs to accept taking responsibility for the recklessness he’d resorted to in order to bring it about. But he doesn’t feel ready. He doesn’t even feel _convinced_ he won’t have it all pried out of his hands at any given moment and be left stranded and meaningless again. He’s not sure if he’ll ever get to feel any steadier either—which, maybe, should be reason enough to acknowledge that there’s no point in dawdling. And yet he _doesn’t feel ready. _

“Eds,” he says, helplessly. 

“No, fuck you, Richie,” and suddenly Eddie’s voice is sharp, harshly sober. “_Why_ did you come back for me.”

He looks, Richie notes with despair, like he’s on the brink of crying, face drawn and shoulders tense as he clings to the brittle stick in his hands, almost snapping it in half. He looks young, or trapped in being too old too soon. He looks—

“I had to,” Richie says, despite everything. “I just—ah, _fuck_.” 

He draws a steadying breath. 

This was never meant to be said. Never, not out loud, not to anyone. It was only half-revealed even to himself, the rest hiding nestled in shapeless, haunting emotions he’d swallow down, relentlessly, rather than attempt to face them. It was too … private and deep set, too bitingly vulnerable. Too messy. And too _much_. 

But now there’s—well, Eddie. Sitting on the sand in his hoodie and his stupid shorts, with a lost expression on his thin exhausted face, and it can’t bear _not saying_. If there was ever any moral question about Richie’s silence on the things he kept silent about, the only meaningful answer would lie nested here, in this particular moment in time. 

So he crouches in the wet sand, opposite to Eddie, and looks him in the face.

“I had to,” he says, plainly. “Else I couldn’t—go on living. I kept _dreaming_ about you drowning. I couldn’t just move on, like they did. I couldn’t go anywhere from that point except back, not as long as _you_ were back there, dead or not, alone. I had to go back.”

There’s a silence, and Eddie isn’t looking at him. He’s looking down, head bent. The wind is ruffling his short hair.

Richie closes his eyes, the ache in his chest almost suffocating. It’s a good ache, though. It grounds him. 

“I know it doesn’t make sense,” he says hoarsely, because that, at least, he can acknowledge, “we didn’t see each other for thirty fucking years. And—”

“Twenty-seven,” Eddie says, very quietly. When Richie opens his eyes in surprise, he’s still looking down. “And it _does_ make sense.”

It’s a strange admission, both in the hushed delivery and its meaning. The wind picks up, and the sea is quite loud, shattering rhythmically upon itself behind him, but Richie suddenly feels like it’s all everything absolutely silent_. _

_It does make sense._ It’s not a logical answer. It’s allowance enough, perhaps, for him to feel like he can exhale, for the first time in two independent lifetimes, without the deep-sealed fear of awakening from a shelter of stifling dormancy. An allowance for—well, what _is_ it, this old feeling, at the bottom? A complicated case of deep attachment? First love? An emotion sleeping where it shouldn’t sleep, shaped to fit a person it’s not supposed to fit? It’s always fit so snugly.

“Okay,” Richie says, blinking fast, feeling a little overwhelmed. Maybe just stunned by the wind. It might not be an _I love you back_, but he’s never hoped for that by a long shot, and he didn’t quite say _I love you_. 

But it’s something, in a sense, better. An allowance, an _acceptance_, given by the only person whose non-acceptance would be well and truly killing. 

He’s still a little shaken when Eddie looks up, troubled, which must be visible on his face because Eddie looks away almost instantly.

“Let’s go home,” he says, and something about the phrasing twists Richie’s heart. “I’m tired.”

* * *

_**VIII.** [Meanwhile, once in a while, I have chanced, among the quick things,_   
_upon the immutable._   
_What more could one ask?]_

After getting _home_, or the closest substitute they have for it now, Eddie wanders straight to the balcony and folds himself into the hammock, face turned up to the ocean. Richie _gets_ it, sure, but he can’t not think about Bill’s words about the meanings of water, and he can’t quite shake the awareness that _alive_ as he might be, Eddie is still so _quiet_. So uncertain.

_I have this life back and I don’t know what to do with it._ Richie isn’t sure what to do with this knowledge, how to help it. How to ask, _stay and let me help you figure it out_, and feel like he has a right to demand it. 

“Come here, dipshit,” Eddie says suddenly, without moving. “And stop staring.”

Obediently, Richie follows him outside: the wind has picked up, but the balcony is sheltered, doesn’t really feel as open and vulnerable as it should. The light is changing again; sinking from blue to faint violet, drowsy and unnervingly swathing. He hesitates for a moment; by any sound logic, now is _not_ the time to push at boundaries. Then again, he thinks he might be unable to stand it much longer, denying himself these small assurances. He feels starved even know. So he hovers over Eddie only a while, and then tumbles into the hammock, ungainly, trying not to jostle him too much.

He notes, with a small flutter of heart, that Eddie doesn’t kick him out, instead bending one leg in the air and stretching the other, so he can reach Richie’s face and kick it lightly with his foot. He looks vaguely smug about it, lying with arms crossed and the hood pulled on. Richie sighs, long-suffering, forcing down a smile. After a moment, Eddie stops picking at him, and Richie can feel him reposition himself in the hammock. He keeps his eyes closed, trying to tune in into the lulling ocean sound.

He startles when he feels a different touch, opening his eyes in alarm only to find Eddie’s face hovering right above him. He’s kneeling over Richie, which is a risky move to make in a hammock containing two grown men, but Richie finds no words to voice the warning. Instead he blinks rapidly, mouth open, and watches in amazement as Eddie tugs at his glasses, pulling them off, and then leans back to settle tilted to one side. Everything goes blurry then, but it’s a endurable blur: Eddie’s close enough to still look unmistakably himself. He’s holding the glasses in both hands.

“When did this happen?” he asks, softly.

“Neibolt,” Richie says meekly, too disarmed by the easy intimacy of the whole thing, how seamlessly it’s come to them, to deflect. “The, uh. The first time.”

Eddie nods, quiet. Then he says, seriously, “You need new glasses, Rich. This isn’t safe. You’ll wake up one day without an eye, and then what?”

It’s such an Eddie thing to say, it’s almost too much to handle. Richie tries to think of something, _anything_, to disperse the sudden nasty emotion rising in his chest, but he can’t. He swallows, feeling himself start to tremble. His eyes feel hot, shameful. He sniffs, and fuck, there is water trailing down his cheek.

“Pay for new ones if you care so much, _dick_,” he chokes out, which is unbelievably stupid overall, given that it lets Eddie hear, in full clarity, just how shattered and wet his voice is. 

Before he can think of anything else, Eddie’s—warm, fuck, unbelievably so—hands are pushing the glasses back onto his nose. He’s frowning down onto Richie, all worried, and Richie snorts. Not a pretty sound.

“Oh, fuck off,” he says, trying to shake Eddie off himself, the closeness becoming somewhat overwhelming. “What, like a grown man can’t have a little cry without judgement. I’ve had a stressful time lately.”

“Clearly,” Eddie says, his voice taut.

Richie sniffs again, raising himself up on his elbows a little. “Yeah, I mean, with your mother leaving me, I’ve just been a mess, and then—” 

Eddie shoves him, hard, and it’s unexpected enough to warrant Richie’s hand slipping from underneath him, and Richie falling, in a wild tangle of limbs, out of the hammock.

“Fuck—” he says, helplessly. For a moment he’s too confused to understand the situation; everything turned upside down, his heart lodged all the way up his heart.

But then it hits him Eddie is laughing—properly _laughing_, loud and joyful, his whole _face_ alight—and reaching down from the hammock in his too-big hoodie, saying something about _Richie’s face_ and _being an idiot_. And Richie does feel, suddenly, like an absolute idiot. It seems for an indefinable hazy moment like something elusive is happening, like maybe Eddie’s going to pull him back in, or maybe he’s reaching for Richie’s face again, maybe to steal his glasses, and Richie can feel his heart in his throat, trembling, and he’s not quite able to breathe. He catches Eddie’s outstretched hands mid-air, and then rises to catch his lips in his own.

And then everything is suddenly, enormously _silent_.

He hears his heart, or _blood_, pulsing in his ears, and he feels Eddie still in surprise, not pulling away but not _reacting_, and he lets them stay suspended in this strange meeting for only a second before pulling sharply away. And then, yes, he’s frightened.

Eddie’s hair is tousled, his mouth is slightly open. He is watching Richie with those wide, round eyes, an expression something like shock on his face. So Richie swallows down his heart, still half-sprawled on the floor and then stammers, panicked and still largely breathless, “I’m sorry. I’m, fuck, I’m—”

Eddie blinks, owlishly. He doesn’t close his mouth. His skin is a little flushed, maybe from the wind. 

“I,” he says, and it’s so breathy and small, he even _sounds_ younger.

Then something shifts in his face, abruptly, and suddenly thrusting his hand out at Richie, grabbing at his forearm.

“Come on back up,” he says sternly, “you’ll catch your death down there, these tiles are fucking _concrete_.”

“Okay, Mom,” Richie says dumbly, which earns him a half-hearted swat. He’s mortified and stunned enough, however, to let himself be tugged back into the hammock without further complaint.

Which should be _unbearable_, some last half-logical part of Richie states, being so close after something … like this. But it isn’t. He thinks maybe there’s something in what Eddie has said earlier, that they never got to grow up as the proper people, and in a way they still belong to a some different, childhood logic.

They must, to some degree, because when he falls back into the hammock next to Eddie—aligned, for once, one next to another—all he does is close his eyes and sigh. 

He thinks, maybe he can even _fall asleep_. He’s pretty tired, it’s evidently getting better of him and the remnants of his reason, and he’d rather not—_think_ too much, right now. So maybe he’ll go to sleep.

Eddie’s knee is nudging its way between his, and Eddie himself is worming his way into some different arrangement of limbs, muttering, “budge up, _asshole_, I’m _not_ falling off”, to which Richie answers “m’kay” keeping his eyes firmly closed and _not_ budging. 

The way they land, Eddie is sprawled more or less on top of him, which is surprisingly comforting: he’s not heavy, he’s warm, and Richie has the morbid pleasure of feeling his heartbeat even through the layers of clothes between them. Eventually Eddie stops moving and lets his head drop inelegantly into the vacant spot between Richie’s head and shoulder, and then Richie feels his warm breath on his neck.

It takes some conscious thought to merely tense a little. He wins, and doesn’t shiver.

Eddie draws an arm loosely around him, and Richie thinks maybe he, too is thinking of falling asleep. Which is—fine, _more_ than fine. It’s, too, strangely comforting. He has a dim sense of _deja vu_ from the beach, which should be crushing, but isn’t. 

It takes a special kind of fucked-up to warrant rejection feeling almost as good as acceptance would, but Richie will gladly take this particular brand of masochism over anything else. It’s fine. It’s fine because he gets to retain what he thinks he missed the _most_ even while he didn’t know it, which is _Eddie,_ _being close to him_. The specifics of closeness suddenly don’t matter.

Until Eddie says, in a quiet mutter, “It’s not just you, you know.”

Richie feels his heartbeat pick up, scattershot, and he knows Eddie must be able to feel it too. He opens his eyes, and looks up onto the ceiling that shelters the balcony. He says nothing.

There’s some time before Eddie continues, but he _does_ continue, “I was like you. I _am_, still.”

And finally, the critical damage, neat as anything Eddie does. “I think I’d _have_ to come back for you too.”

Richie swallows. He lets his shaking hand move slightly, and touch Eddie’s back, tracing the muffled outline of the scar, only to finally let it rest, finger splayed, between the shoulder blades.

He says, in a tragically hoarse voice, “Good to know,” and Eddie, the fucker, _laughs_ at him. 

He was wrong, of course. Richie is always wrong. No kind of rejection could ever get him feeling this fucking high.

* * *

** _IX. _ ** _[That was then, which hasn't ended yet.]_

He wakes up absolutely disoriented to a loud banging sound.

Eddie is still sprawled across him—a discovery exhilarating in and of itself—and only mumbles something incoherent when Richie extricates himself from his bundle of warm limbs and half-staggers, half-skips inside.

For some reason, in all his cloudiness, he’s expecting Diane Keton to have followed them all the way across America to sedate and kidnap Eddie, so he grabs one of the empty beer bottles in the event he has to knock her unconscious before rounding the corner and advancing across the hallway.

When he opens the door, he sees Bill. 

It’s like a slap in the face.

“F-fucking h-hell, R-richie,” Bill says, voice tight. He’s staring at the bottle in Richie’s hand. He looks exhausted, too, like he hasn’t slept well in days. He looks angry. He looks—_relieved_. 

“Uh,” Richie manages, dumbstruck, lowering his bottle. It’s more or less all that manages to happen before the rest of the Losers come barging in: Bev is there, shoving him in the chest until he backs up against the wall, and then Mike is yanking the bottle out of his hand. Ben, too. Ben just _looks_, but it’s a looking that’s hard to endure without ducking the head. 

“Fuck you,” Bev says, hotly, something like angry tears ringing in her voice. “Fuck you, Richie, this is not fair. You don’t do such things. You don’t—fucking disappear off the face of the Earth without warning, after a whole month of being borderline suicidal, making up some rubbish fucking lie about going to Alaska. We thought—after Stan, we thought—_fuck_ you, god, Richie, you absolute ass. I’m so glad to see you.”

She hugs him, quick and bone-crushing, before Richie has time to react.

“Uh,” he repeats, stupidly, looking between them. Something in his brain refuses to work. He can’t quite reconcile what he’s seeing with any logic. “How did you guys even—” 

“Find you?” Mike asks, tensely, and Richie nods. “Wasn’t fucking easy, man. Once we’ve established you’re neither in Alaska nor in any of your known hiding spots, we had to do a little investigation of our own. People spotted you all the time, and mostly, it wasn’t even _you_. But then, fuck it, your stupid _manager_ recalled you have an apartment in fucking Monterey. So we thought, why not.”

“Why not indeed,” Richie echoes, nervously. No one replies.

They herd him into the small living room, advancing until he’s sat on the small pullout couch—which, he notes hazily, he never even _thought_ to point out to Eddie—and they all loom over him, looking expectant and angry still. And the thing is, Richie knows they’re right to be both, and he knows he needs to explain himself, but he—he doesn’t know _how_. He has no clue. Any attempt at voicing any of the things he's done, without sounding—well, _bad_—seems futile. 

Finally, Bev seems to sense he’s at a loss, so she crouches in front of him, similar to what he’s done to Eddie on the beach, and asks, “Honey, what happened?”

Something in the phrase, the soft tone in which she says it, hits him harder than any anger or concern ever could. He freezes.

_Honey, he’s dead._

“I went back,” Richie says, barely even a sound, and everything seems to stop, instantly, and freeze into a well of silence. 

“I went back for Eddie.”

They all look at him. All of them, with shock-frozen expressions which seamlessly fade into something way more tragic—empathy, maybe, or pity. Richie isn’t above acknowledging he’s pitiful. _None of it makes sense_, a voice in his head supplies, sounding like Stan, which _doesn’t fucking make sense either_. But stunned as he is, _exhausted_ as he is, he won’t give up his wonky logic so easily. So it doesn’t fucking make sense. So _what_.

“No, no,” he says, raising his hands as if to soothe them.It probably only makes him look less stable. “No, it’s _okay_. It worked. I—I brought him back. I brought—Eddie, back.”

The silence that falls then is incomparably worse.

It’s not just that they don’t believe him, he didn’t really _expect_ them to believe him. It’s just that—oh, they _want_ to. He can feel it, in this strange co-awareness they have of each other, he can feel how desperate they are to believe him, and how even then, they can’t.

And suddenly, he wavers.

_It doesn’t make sense._ It never did, not for a moment, none of it. Him, crawling back under the house, him, the coward who only ever tried to run away, the weakest of them all, wading through the grime and rubble, hauling a human body, hauling it in the lake, pulling it underwater. It makes no sense. 

Such things don’t happen. And none of them woke up one day, with an intention to bring Stan back, from wherever it was he departed to. None of them were able to bend logic so far. So how was _this_ different? How was Richie’s childish despair better suited to demand miracles than their shared, indisputable grief? There is no _accounting_ for it, not logically. Not unless you form a new logic.

_Water logic_. He looks sideways into the open bedroom. _A logic that floats._ The balcony door is not visible from this angle, but there’s a clear passage, it would take less than a minute to go and check. He thinks of Eddie maybe sleeping out there, maybe still unaware of any of this happening. Wonders if he’s heard them shout and kept quiet, odd as it may be. 

He wonders, for the first time in full clarity, if Eddie is even there.

His hands are shaking. There’s only one option: to go and be confronted with either sort of reality. He thinks, if he comes out into the windy outside and Eddie is there, right now, then he will also _be there_ indefinitely. 

If he comes out and there’s only water, maybe there’s a reason for the water.

He realizes, oddly belated, they’re all holding him. Same as back then, in the quarry, a sort of protective huddle around Richie. He’s not really crying this time, but he’s shaking all the same. It’s comforting, this circle-loop, repetition. And it makes him think of something else. 

They un-believed a clown, belittling it out of existence. Can _he_ not _believe_ Eddie back to life?

Did he not do it?

“Just wait a second,” he says at last, bracing himself. “Wait here just a second, guys. Let me—get something. I’ll be right back, promise. No running away.”

It takes some time to disentangle himself from them; to be allowed to leave. One of them will probably follow, as soon as he hesitates a moment too long. 

It doesn’t matter. None of it does. 

He walks out onto the balcony, as in an act of turning: half-expecting nothing but a pillar of salt.

* * *

He has a memory he thinks of more often than any other.

They’re walking through the field, Eddie and him, stupid glasses and fanny pack and all. It’s late summer, scorching hot.

“I can’t wait to leave this fucking town,” Richie says, inconsequential. “Soon as I’m eighteen, I’m hightailing it outta here, Eds, mark my words.”

And then Eddie says, “Not without me, you're fucking not.”

* * *

He sinks to his knees by the hammock and closes his eyes, letting the clumsy impatient hands map out his face hazily. He hears a discontented sigh, then a voice, rough with sleep and disuse.Eddie says, “You feel _cold_.”

The water crashes loud. Still kneeling, Richie buries his head in Eddie’s neck and closes his eyes.

“C’mon, Tink,” he mutters, “we need a bunch of fucking children to believe in you.”

_**X.** [I climb, I backtrack._   
_I float._   
_I ramble my way home.]_

**Author's Note:**

> update: stan lives too. i wrote this in autumn before i was introduced to the concept of patty. patty believes stan back to life, thank you.
> 
> first i was going for a proper open ending, leaving it open to the reader what richie sees on the balcony. it's still kind of an open ending, depending on how you think about it. but i wanted it to be hopeful.
> 
> the quotes and title from a mary oliver poem because! yearning
> 
> please, please, talk to me. each review brings me back a little from the underworld
> 
> i’m on twitter where i talk a lot @lvslies


End file.
